Jeff and I are pretending he’s a firefighter. Ex-members of an improv troupe, we know how to sell it. So when Jeff strides in wearing an electric-yellow domed helmet, smelling of char, ash on his cheeks like a priest’s thumb had slipped, I keep my cool.
“Was there a big fire?” I ask.
“Huge,” he says. “I barely made it out alive.”
“How did it start?”
“A lit cigarette in the recycling bin.”
“Did you carry anyone out of the building? A secretary, maybe?”
Jeff blinks, looking betrayed. His pupils are glistening nuggets of coal.
“I never said it was an office fire.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry for jumping to conclusions.”
Now we’re back to the therapy script. Jeff shuffles in the costume he got from who-knows-where, looking less like a firefighter and more like someone pretending to be one. Which he is, of course.
I soften. Touched by an urge to touch him. To wipe the eye black from his face with a soapy washcloth. “Let’s get you cleaned up,” I say, and lead him to the tub.
It started last week in infidelity counseling.
“Every time you leave for work I feel terrified, knowing you’ll be around her.”
I always say “her” that way—in vocal italics. The counselor, meanwhile, speaks about her in the blandest tone imaginable, the equivalent of Times New Roman or Arial, determinedly neutral. Jeff avoids names, identifying adjectives, even gendered pronouns.
“It also makes me scared. I hate being in the office. I hate seeing them.”
I gulped down ginormous swallows of air. “I also hate talking about it. So much.”
“Is there a way? To acknowledge how difficult this is? For both of you?” the counselor asked, breaking the question into pieces the way a parent saws a vegetable into small, inoffensive bites for a child.
We both made nonverbal noises to show that we were processing. I could tell, though, that Jeff was really thinking. Making an effort for once. His hand stole closer to mine.
“How did you two first connect?” she asked.
“In an improv group,” Jeff said. “We were put in a two-person scene together where we were supposed to introduce every statement with That’s right, Bob.’ Then add something else, something crazy.”
‘That’s right, Bob.’ Then add something else, something crazy.”
“That’s right, Bob,” I said quietly.
The counselor’s eyes glistened like we’d just presented her with a key. “So you have practice with dismantling rigid mindsets.” Jeff and I exchanged glances. The ‘That’s right, Bob’ exercise had ended with me undermining Jeff’s idea, turning a doctor’s office into a hair salon, a mimed stethoscope into a beard trimmer. “I have something a little unorthodox to propose.”
The morning after, I wake to find Jeff lying next to me still wearing the firefighter jacket, half-buttoned. It’s the first night he hasn’t slept on the couch since I discovered his secret credit card account, the hotel-room payments. I wait for him to stir, unsure if the Jeff with his legs scissoring the sheets is Jeff the firefighter or Jeff the atoning husband.
Eventually his eyelids jump open, as if he’d been feigning sleep. “Morning honey,” he says, in a voice gruffer than usual.
“Good morning,” I say cautiously.
As he sheds the firefighter gear, pulls on crisp office clothes, I study him. Scanning for evidence to decipher whether the charade is still on. There’s something urgent, commanding, in the way he dresses, like a fire needs extinguishing. But then small mannerisms, how he wets his finger with his tongue to slick down a rebounding cowlick, assure me that it’s him, my Jeff. Like a knife that’s diced onions before slicing fruit, the two Jeffs become one, flavors transferring, bleeding.
After he kisses me goodbye, I watch his car peel off through the window. For once my thoughts drift from him and the secretary. The dark shimmer of a Tiffany’s ruby in the hollow of her throat (because her name is Ruby, I know against my will, how cliché). The many, many Trojans in his desk drawer. The many, many emails I had to set to infinite scroll so I wouldn’t keep clicking the next arrow. Instead I wonder which Jeff I’ll meet tonight. That was the idea: replace real danger with staged danger, run our fear through a clean tap. Images hijack me—a burning building, hissing extinguishers, wooden beams collapsing, his face scarred and melted beyond recognition.
It’s astronaut Jeff who sidles through the front door tonight. Waddling in a bulky space suit, bubble helmet tucked beneath his arm. I’m awed by his commitment: even his hair shows it, disheveled and sweaty, like he’s been wearing the helmet for dozens of rotations around the sun.
“The oxygen tank almost gave out on me. I thought I was going to die. It was the thought of you that kept me breathing,” he says, over-emoting. That was always his weak area in improv, going too far.
I plaster on a microexpression that conveys both worry and relief. He kisses me with hammy passion. I can’t wrap my arms fully around the suit, it’s too cumbersome.
“Tell me about Venus,” I say as he lifts me up, totes me to the bedroom.
“Tell me about Mars.”
Over the next month I meet a lot of Jeffs. One mauled by a lion, the SFX makeup on his thigh bunched like crushed velvet. A thrill-seeking F1 racer. A sword swallower, an aerialist, a tightrope walker. Jeff in a chiton, smelling of the sea, calling me Penelope. Jeff hauled up from a scuba diving lesson gone wrong, sinking deeper and deeper until his intrepid instructor rescued him (a detail that makes me feel funny). He says it’s the thought of me, every time, that carries him from danger. Reminds him to kick his feet toward land.
There’s a character I meet more than once: Jeff the pilot. Unlike the others, who tremble in my arms, demanding comfort, this Jeff seems to thrive on risk. Nosedive landings, blades snuck into carry-ons, he laughs when he tells me about his brushes with mortality.
The second time he comes home wearing a pilot cap, winged, golden insignia shining like a drop of hot oil, I almost break character.
“Back so soon?” I ask.
“I can’t stay away,” he says, then fixes me with a stare. The handle of a small roller bag is grasped in his hand, its wheels caught in the welcome mat’s rough fibers. He looks over his shoulder, through the still open door, at something I can’t see.
“What are you waiting for?”
The cap shades his eyes. He reaches for the doorknob and holds it, holds it for a long moment before shutting us in together.
One evening, no Jeff.
A week after his disappearance I get a letter from his “copilot.” It’s his sloppy cursive, I recognize it instantly, the l’s and t’s leaning toward each other like lovers who can’t bear to be parted. The letter tells me Jeff the pilot was a hero. That he saved every passenger on the plane but himself. I should remember: the last words out of his mouth were how much he’d miss his wife.
